KASPROVIEZ

French artist Alexandre Kasproviez (b. 1995) is best known for his very large scale paintings depicting anonymous male figures and landscapes rendered in a painterly haze of slow horizontal and vertical brushstrokes.

Kasproviez spent his childhood in Reunion Island before moving successively to the South West of France, Hong Kong, Rio de Janeiro, Barcelona, New York City. He now resides and works in Madrid, where the tranquil oceanic rhythms of his youth and the dynamic vibrancy of urban life in his favorite metropolises continue to shape his artistic vision.

From an early age, Kasproviez was captivated by photography, a passion passed down from his parents and grandfather. This early fascination led him to explore the themes of landscape and movement, often capturing blurred images through the car window. His obsession with movement naturally transitioned into a love for drawing and painting. In 2021, he met Ross Bleckner, who became his mentor and introduced him to oil painting. Just a year later, Kasproviez gained attention during his first solo exhibition, supported by Alfredo Paredes at the Chelsea Arts Center in New York City, showcasing over forty paintings of anonymous male figures. His personal experiences deeply inform his work. Understanding Kasproviez’s oeuvre necessitates an appreciation of his personal narrative.

One encounters beneath those delicate transparent brushstrokes an intimate and effervescent visual adventure based on the artist’s direct experiences and memories. His creative process consists of building up the painting with various layers of oil paint, blocking out the composition, before carefully manipulating the painterly surface to add an intimate filter on top of the picture.

By removing, blurring, erasing, and painting, the original image starts to dissolve, as if the subject continues to nestle deeper and deeper into the canvas. This complex creative process creates an unusual distance between the viewer and the subject. Even when standing very close in front of the canvas, the subject is protected by the subtractive painting process, suggesting not only a feeling of vulnerability and closeness but also adding an intimate filter to his figures—as if gazing into a distant and personal memory of the artist.

Alexandre Kasproviez connects the durational element of memory with the durational aspect of the painterly process—hence its visibility. And yet, on the other hand, paradoxically, this sincere, honest, and intimate dimension of the artist’s presence blurs the picture, dissolving the image and protecting the subject—a symbolic and metaphorical act by the artist considering the personal traces in the selected imagery.

After numerous solo and group exhibitions in galleries in New York City, Brussels, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and Madrid, Kasproviez participated in his first public and collective exhibition in Paris at the Chamber of Commerce (CCI) in 2023.

Kasproviez escapes the snapshot and enters the time and space continuum. This allows one to experience the intimacy of memory, the materiality of the creative process, and the profound connection between the two within his paintings.